There was nothing more to do or say. She crouched down at the side of the bed, and Fitzpiers took a seat. Thus they remained in silence, and long as it lasted she never turned her eyes, or apparently her thoughts, at all to her husband. He occasionally murmured, with automatic authority, some slight directions for alleviating the pain of the dying man, which she mechanically obeyed, bending over him during the intervals in silent tears.
Winterborne never recovered consciousness of what was passing; and that he was going became soon perceptible also to her. In less than an hour the delirium ceased; then there was an interval of somnolent painlessness and soft breathing, at the end of which Winterborne passed quietly away.
Then Fitzpiers broke the silence. “Have you lived here long?” said he.
Grace was wild with sorrow—with all that had befallen her—with the cruelties that had attacked her—with life—with Heaven. She answered at random. “Yes. By what right do you ask?”
“Don’t think I claim any right,” said Fitzpiers, sadly. “It is for you to do and say what you choose. I admit, quite as much as you feel, that I am a vagabond—a brute—not worthy to possess the smallest fragment of you. But here I am, and I have happened to take sufficient interest in you to make that inquiry.”
“He is everything to me!” said Grace, hardly heeding her husband, and laying her hand reverently on the dead man’s eyelids, where she kept it a long time, pressing down their lashes with gentle touches, as if she were stroking a little bird.
He watched her a while, and then glanced round the chamber where his eyes fell upon a few dressing necessaries that she had brought.
“Grace—if I may call you so,” he said, “I have been already humiliated almost to the depths. I have come back since you refused to join me elsewhere—I have entered your father’s house, and borne all that that cost me without flinching, because I have felt that I deserved humiliation. But is there a yet greater humiliation in store for me? You say you have been living here—that he is everything to you. Am I to draw from that the obvious, the extremest inference?”
Triumph at any price is sweet to men and women—especially the latter. It was her first and last opportunity of repaying him for the cruel contumely which she had borne at his hands so docilely.
“Yes,” she answered; and there was that in her subtly compounded nature which made her feel a thrill of pride as she did so.